Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.
And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)
The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.
If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.
The columnist is a Guardian US writer
